A journal of an American expatriate who was living in Melbourne, Australia working remotely for a US company but is now living and working in Auckland, New Zealand. Anything is fair game - traveling, current events, sport, and anything else that suits me.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Travel

I've been pretty horrible about updating the blog this week. Last Friday, I flew back from San Francisco after meetings in Seattle. Normal flight, save a two hour maintenance delay. Nothing that we couldn't make up for. I stopped off in Sydney, where I met up with Shannon, and we did a bit of touristy stuff. She had come up the day before and gone to see a lot of the things I saw the first time I was there, so we hit the ferry (after a jug, of course) and went to Manly beach. It was quite pretty on that side and we got to hang out on the beach for a bit. I guess it's the Tasman Sea at that point, but I'm not quite clear where the Sea meets the Pacific.

We opted to fly back to Melbourne Monday morning on UA, so that we could be back in time for Australia Day festivities. While there was plenty of good stuff going on in Sydney, the flights we would have needed to try for on Qantas would have wrecked the afternoon, so we opted to go early. We went to a park near the CBD where there was a carnival type thing going on with barbecues, exhibits, demonstrations and general revelry. We also hit up the Chinese New Year celebration that wasn't far away and had some tasty food. And in what seems to me like true Australian form, we went to the Young and Jackson's Hotel for a beer tasting party, with samples from five Australian microbrewers. Most of them were good. We are starting to figure out that there is actually some good beer in the country, which is nice. If you're going to pay top dollar, it might as well be good. What later turned out to be one big study abroad group, the hotel seemed to be swarmed with Americans. We couldn't figure out why, but since they came as one group, it makes sense. They were also rather stupid. Sigh. Kids.

The week that followed brought record high temperatures, which of course doesn't suit me at all. For four days, it was 43 degrees C, which is about 110 degrees F. So, I basically holed up under the AC vent, and worked. I only rode one day last week, and it was bloody miserable, even being home by 10. The heat broke, to some degree, but it's still summer time. It's odd having this season back. I think it's my least favorite!